MS Fights Gmail With 2-GB Exchange Mailboxes

prawnonthebarbie writes "Microsoft is battling the trend for frazzled office workers to give up on Outlook and auto-forward all their mail to Gmail: the company is promising 2-GB mailboxes in Exchange 2007 rather than the piffling 50-MB mailboxes most workplaces have now. Speaking at the launch of Vista, Office, and Exchange in Singapore, Microsoft Product Marketing Manager Martha DeAmicis said Microsoft had built clustered replication into Exchange so corporate IT admins wouldn't be worrying about backing up big mailboxes to tape. However, its killer feature appears to be its plans to make those gigs of email available on Joe Officeworker's mobile phone."

Comments

Re:People actually do this?

[rsilvergun]

If you're a sales rep with decent leeway, you just give out a gmail address to your contacts instead of your corporate address. What IT don't know can't hurt you :)

The Real Problem

[mistralol]

The real problem exchange actually has is that fact its so awkward to backup or restore from backup.
Mayby microsoft should solve some valid issues first in stead of ones thats the person who runs the exchange server call already solve.

You should have a look at the methods required to resotre an single email box from a tape backup. You need at least 1 set of the same hardware todo it the "microsoft procedure way" all 72 steps of it and it takes around 2 days to complete.

Really exchange is a joke. When things go wrong it spits out nothing useful and spits out errors all the time when its running correctly.

All in all end users whine if their email quota is to small but others will whine because its slow . You get whine if you do and whine if you dont.

Exchange Mailbox Restoration-yada, yada, yada

[LibertineR]

I know its going to come up, from those of you who cant figure out how to restore your Exchange mailboxes, and with the 2G thing it becomes even more important.

First, keep your transaction logs on a separate disk array. If you dont, FORGET reliably restoring your mailboxes.

Second, make sure you use the VSS (Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service) when backing up your mailboxes.

The number one issue I see when called in to fix these messes, is Exchange Admins keeping the Transaction logs and the database on the same hardware, as though you could lose one without losing the other.

Restoring Exchange is hard, but it CAN BE DONE, bitches!

Backup/Restore feature, not GMail

[Anonymous Coward]

Having worked on Exchange for nearly a decade, I can tell you that no one was thinking "Gee, lets compete with GMail by making database maintainence easier". That said, who knows how marketing spins things once it gets in their hands.

The feature described is actually to solve the problems Admins have had with the time it takes to do full backups of large MDB's. As end users have demanded larger e-mailboxes, the size of the MDB's have grown. Since these are typically taken offline during off peak hours for full backups, this increase in size has forced either constraints on mailbox size or limited the number of mailboxes per MDB.

So much for evil nevarious plans to take down GMail (other than the kooky ideas marketing comes up with). :P

Re:People actually do this?

[devilspgd]

My experience has been that sales guys don't get it -- They usually have little concept of professionalism, and even less respect for corporate structure unless it helps them to make the sale at all costs.

If sales is allowed to rule the roost, it's usually a sign of a corporate structure that doesn't wow me.

If sales is kept reined in, I'm a happy guy.

If someone asks me to use a Gmail account for a specific need, I don't have a problem with that -- It's when they use it exclusively...